Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c7.s1.5

c7.s1.5

On Indian plants he is a little more satisfactory. He mentions the cinnamon, giving it its Tamil name *kārppu* (*κάρπιον*)²; also the cocoa-nut, the Indian reed (probably the palmyra, though Lassen says the bamboo), and the fact that there are male and female palms. He mentions cotton, as do most Greek writers on India. He also speaks of the “sweet wine” (*tāḍi*) of the palm³. With regard to animals, on the contrary, he indulges in the most ludicrous legends. He speaks fairly sensibly, indeed, of the elephant, the jackal and the parrot. The wild ass, or unicorn⁴, whose horn has such wonderful properties, may be the rhinoceros, and the *Skōlēx*, a gigantic worm with two huge teeth, living in the Indus and preying on animals, may be the crocodile. But the descriptions are wildly inaccurate. The *Martichora*, with its triple rows of teeth, the sting in its tail, and other strange attributes, is the man-eating tiger, but the picture is wilfully¹ distorted, almost out of recognition. The dung of the bird Dikairos, which produces sleep and even death, can hardly be *opium*, as opium was then unknown in India. The griffin is the gold-guarding ant of the other writers. It has been suggested, though Lassen does not agree, that Ktesias was influenced by the huge mythological animals of the Assyrian sculptures.